😑 How your tax season just got more annoying

🔥 Today’s Lever story (attached below): What happens when you privatize firefighters?

🎧 Flashback on Lever Time: The TurboTax mafia is trying to trap you this return season.

⏪ The Lever's ICYMI: Here’s why Trump is so obsessed with Greenland.

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 991-word newsletter to learn about:

• The canary in the AI coal mine.
• Trump’s wrench in your 2024 tax return.
• The corporate corruption behind your fried chicken.
• A legacy movie studio’s capitulation to MAGA.

👮 This is what anti-populism looks like. They just defunded the financial fraud police.

🤖 Skynet warns that Skynet could help terrorists. After Trump rolled back initiatives to regulate artificial intelligence, AI giants are admitting their systems are on the verge of being able to help users construct deadly weapons. OpenAI disclosed that its “models are on the cusp of being able to meaningfully help novices create known biological threats.” Anthropic says that in testing related to chemical and bioweapons, “there is a substantial probability that our next model may require ASL-3 safeguards” — which are for situations that “substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse.” Read more about AI threats here.

🙏 RIP Gene Hackman. We’ve lost one of the greats, who had a knack for playing some really disgusting government officials. 

🎥 Hollywood bends the knee. Paramount Pictures announced it’s rolling back its voluntary diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to comply with the White House’s anti-DEI mandate. The studio's song and dance for Trump comes as Paramount seeks his administration’s approval for an $8 billion merger with fellow producer Skydance.

🔄 Loading… Silicon Valley’s realignment. The former Republican chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee is now moonlighting as an adviser to the investment firm of GOP megadonor Marc Andreessen. He’s been waging war on the agencies tasked with overseeing Big Tech’s businesses. It’s all part of Silicon Valley’s realignment to the GOP. A 2017 survey of wealthy tech entrepreneurs found they leaned overwhelmingly liberal on all issues, except in the case of one: Business regulation.

🍗 KFC goes corporate carpetbagging. Kentucky Fried Chicken might’ve just become Texas Fried Chicken. The famed fast food chain’s parent company — which also owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut — announced this week that KFC is moving its headquarters to Texas. Yum! Brands — which has a history of quashing worker protections — follows a trail of corporations that have moved company HQs to the Lone Star state for its Big Oil-bought billionaires’ business courts and zero percent corporate tax rate.

In the last five years, the share of total motion picture and sound recording industry jobs in California has plummeted from 45 percent to below 30 percent (Source: St. Louis Fed)

🐦 The canary just died. Microsoft is withdrawing from plans to expand its energy-guzzling artificial intelligence data centers after the computing giant’s CEO publicly questioned whether AI is really worth anything at all. Over the years, Microsoft has invested a cool $13 billion in Sam Altman’s OpenAI — but now the software company is also reportedly distancing itself from the AI firm’s main product, ChatGPT.

A person looks at TurboTax prep books for sale. (Peter Barreras/AP Images for Turbo Tax Via AP File)

This year’s Tax Day is likely to be worse than ever. Trump reportedly fired more than 6,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service, and as a result, Americans can expect poor customer service, slow wait times, and even delayed refunds this year. However, the ultrawealthy — who during the last Trump term were audited less than ever — could see massive savings from reduced staffing and lessened enforcement at the IRS. The country’s top earners already evade more than $150 billion in taxes each year. 

At least Direct File is still working. The IRS’s new Direct File system is a bright spot – and wildly popular. It allows eligible taxpayers making less than $200,000 to circumvent pricey tax services and file directly with the IRS at no cost. Americans traditionally spend an average of 13 hours and $240 just to get their taxes done each year. Direct File saved some 140,000 Americans a combined $5.6 million on tax preparation in 2024 — and many users say it took them less than 30 minutes to file. 

But maybe not for long… to Intuit’s delight. House Republicans bankrolled by the tax prep industry are now pressing Trump to kill Direct File. Despite this, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pledged to protect Direct File “for this tax season” — while also promising to review the program as Elon Musk targeted it to be “deleted.” Tax prep giants and their lobbyists have funneled $1.8 million to the GOP lawmakers who signed a recent letter pushing to dismantle Direct File. Those tax prep companies have also spent more than $90 million lobbying the government since the 2000s.

WTF! This whole thing should be a lot easier. Being buried in paperwork and having to pay private corporations to file taxes is a uniquely American experience. Sweden, Denmark, and more than 30 other countries offer “return-free filing,” in which the government sends taxpayers their forms already filled out and lets them decide whether to sign and pay or do the calculations on their own. Ronald Reagan touted the idea in 1985 — but the tax prep industry and its bankrolled lawmakers have blocked it.

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🫴 Welfare for me, but not for thee. Jeff Bezos has turned The Washington Post into his personal corporate propaganda machine promoting “economic freedoms” and “free markets.” Free markets, however, haven’t gifted Bezos’ Amazon $11 billion in subsidies since 2000 — taxpayers did. Why is it that billionaires only have a problem with government handouts when they’re going to you?

🐋 A whale of a tale. A real-life Jonah story, and he lived to tell about it.

🫛 Chickpeas aren’t actually peas. But they are a miracle food. 

🏀 One of the most ridiculous dunks in NBA history just happened. You gotta see it to believe it.

Class solidarity basically doesn’t exist in America — except at the tippy top.

Adin Kloetzel fights a wildfire in Montana. (Credit: Adin Kloetzel)

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On Feb. 14, Adin Kloetzel lost his job as a trails forestry technician at the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwest Montana, where he hauled supplies into remote areas by mule, cut trails, and supported firefighting efforts. 

Like many of 3,400 Forest Service employees abruptly fired by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Kloetzel’s permanent job offer last spring had come with a year-long “probationary” period, giving him fewer job protections. Since he lives in Forest Service housing, he also lost his housing. Altogether, around a quarter of the ranger district’s employees were fired. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” he says.

But Kloetzel is worried about more than just his career. He fears the cuts to the Forest Service will prevent the agency from properly managing national forests and wildfire threats — and potentially be used as justification to transfer federal management to the states, opening the door to privatizing public lands and services. 

Stripping the Forest Service of its seasoned workforce ensures that when fires spark, they will find public lands less defended and ready to burn, as climate change creates warmer, drier conditions and extends fire seasons. Reducing firefighting services leaves communities more vulnerable to these growing risks. 

Adin Kloetzel with a mule train at work for the U.S. Forest Service. (Credit: Adin Kloetzel)

Creating staffing shortages may make contractors seem like the only viable solution, says Rod Dow, a retired smokejumper who spent 45 years fighting fires in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Much of what federal land managers do will be difficult to replicate, he warns. It takes 10 to 15 years to gain the qualifications to manage large-scale fires, he says, so the recent job cuts don’t just gut the agency’s ability to perform necessary physical tasks: All the money and time invested in staff training disappeared, too.

Their loss “will have a devastating impact on agency missions and government operations,” wrote Doreen Greenwald, the National Treasury Employees Union president in a letter to union members.

For example, fire camps, temporary on-the-ground hubs for firefighting operations, require an incredible amount of infrastructure and rapid communication spanning multiple government agencies. “It’s not going to be easy to convert that over to a privatized arrangement,” Dow says. “It would be really stupid. That doesn’t mean [Donald] Trump and [Elon] Musk aren’t going to do it.”

Nevertheless, increasing budget cuts have already forced public lands to turn to private contracts for basic tasks in recent years. Under his first term, Trump oversaw efforts to increase private-sector involvement in national park facilities. The 2016 Republican Party platform suggested rethinking the “absentee ownership” of the federal government, stating, “Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.” 

BONUS: Tales Of A Smokejumper

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In 2017, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke took steps to do so, allowing private companies to upgrade and operate campgrounds to address the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog, which exceeded $11 billion at the time, and which Trump went on to cut by 12 percent. The National Park Service currently has more than 500 concession contracts, generating over $1 billion in revenue for those private companies. 

These budget cuts extended to the Forest Service, too. According to the National Wildfire Suppression Association, which represents 12,000 private contractors, approximately 45 percent of fire resources are now provided by private companies. (Experts told The Lever this figure seemed exaggerated, but exact numbers depend on how you count: The Forest Service says it has about 35,000 service members, not all of whom primarily work on fighting fire. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has about 18,000 dedicated firefighters, a number that reflects its hiring challenges.)

For-profit operators don’t have an obligation to stage equipment in risky areas or dispatch support to other locations — private businesses can simply decline a contract if the job isn’t profitable. The free market might not make saving your home an attractive proposition. 

Reducing federal land management — whether that’s selling off public lands or turning control over to states — fragments oversight and reduces resources. Unlike the Forest Service, which has coordinated interagency support, many states lack the funding, staff, or infrastructure to handle large-scale fires. 

Trump, who previously suggested California “clean your forests” by rake while blasting the state’s forest fire management strategy, campaigned in 2024 on selling off federal land to developers. Since taking office, the President has proposed selling the nation’s public lands to provide funding for a sovereign wealth fund, along with firing an additional 1,000 National Park Service employees. 

Kloetzel has seen a move toward privatization already playing out in Montana, where the Forest Service recently authorized a controversial land swap in the state’s Crazy Mountains. In January, the agency approved the transfer of almost 4,000 acres of federal land to private owners, including the Yellowstone Club, which is affiliated with the ski resort Big Sky. The stunning area was exchanged for an alternate parcel Kloetzel describes as “flat, weedy range land.” 

“Honestly, I agree the federal government could use a ‘fat trimming,’” Kloetzel says, but “I’m worried about land swaps that put public land in private hands in order to profit.”

“Sooner Or Later, Something’s Going To Happen”

Owen Wickenheiser juggled a walkie-talkie, tuning in as it squawked with updates from his winter job as a ski patroller. 

Like Kloetzel, he’s spent his career caring for public lands and protecting the people who visit them. Until Feb. 14, he was a wilderness ranger in the Okanagan National Forest, primarily working in the wilderness area of the Enchantment Mountains in Washington’s central Cascades. It’s one of the state’s top destinations, attracting tens of thousands of tourists each year. 

Owen Wickenheiser at work in the Enchantments. (Photo Credit: Owen Wickenheiser)

Every summer, he helped fly out up to 10,000 pounds of human waste from the Colchuck Lake area, an operation that involved helicopters and rappel crews. “There is no plan to make sure that happens this year right now,” he says bluntly. The Colchuck Lake drains into one of the two main water sources for the nearby town of Leavenworth. 

Wickenheiser says that’s far from the only hazard looming: Much of his job is monitoring for fires, especially those intentionally set by campers. “There’s a lot of beetle kill, a ton of standing dead trees,” he says. If an errant spark caught in the wilderness, it could quickly rip down the valleys into downtown Leavenworth. Meanwhile, many of the area’s medically-trained wilderness first responders were just fired in the same layoffs. 

Though firefighters were supposed to be exempt from these staff cuts, people who lost their jobs like Wickenheiser and Kloetzel conducted essential work for fire crews. Many, like Kloetzel, also had a “Red Card,” a certification that qualifies them to work on wildland firefighting assignments — and he had repeatedly been asked to do so. 

After spending 16 hours on the line, firefighters rely on incident command post staff, who are often permanent or seasonal workers, for things like food, shelter, and meteorological and technical support. “All these duties will either have to be contracted out, which is a lot more expensive,” Wickenheiser says, “[or] we’re just going to have teams that are really, really lacking learned experience because people just won’t be there anymore.”

In a letter reviewed by The Lever, the new Department of Agriculture secretary pledged her support and assurance firefighters would have “the tools and resources need[ed] to safely and effectively carry out [their] mission.” 

In practice, firefighters say that’s not how it’s playing out. Dow’s own nephew is on a Hotshot crew based in Alaska, one of the elite teams deployed to the most challenging and large-scale wildfires. Hiring for the 20-person crew is currently frozen due to Trump administration policies, meaning they can’t replace any members they lose to other jobs, injury, or illness. They need at least 18 people to keep their ability to deploy in certain situations, and the time window to hire additional crew members is closing. 

“If they don’t have it figured out in a month,” Dow says, “they’re going to be in trouble.” He says the freeze could be a critical problem for wildland firefighting operations nationwide, especially as fire season ramps up in North America. 

Rod Dow on the porch of his cabin outside of Ellensburg, Wash. (Photo Credit: Rod Dow)

Bureau of Land Management fire management staff across multiple states told The Lever this week the Department of Government Efficiency put a $1 limit on their purchase credit cards and their travel credit cards, preventing them from buying time-sensitive supplies to prepare for the fire season. It means if there were to be a fire, they potentially couldn’t travel to fight it. The move came after similar measures were placed on other federal agencies.

The Trump administration also recently froze about $3 billion in wildfire mitigation efforts, which may impact land management on state lands that rely on federal funding. 

“Watching Musk cavorting on stage with a bedazzled chain saw that he’s never run in his life, while the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd laughed and cheered is especially galling juxtaposed with this,” Dow adds.

Though skeletal crews might be able to stumble along during normal conditions, when fire season hits and things get busier, Dow says, “sooner or later, something’s gonna happen.” 

The decisions made this month, may function as fate when a disaster inevitably strikes. Given all the necessary equipment and skills needed for a successful fire command, he says, “You’re gonna lose somebody’s house, or somebody’s going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you just don’t have the helicopter time to go save them.”

“Devastating Impact”

The mass firings have also raised significant legal and procedural concerns. 

On Feb. 19, a coalition of federal labor unions filed a temporary restraining order to halt the employment decisions in a U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. In Yosemite, where an upside-down flag was hung over the weekend to protest the staff cuts. A handful may find their positions restored as the Trump administration appeared to backtrack, announcing plans to restore just 50 jobs to parks nationwide. 

Many, like Kloetzel, were told in their termination notice that they had “performed poorly.” He’s hoping to appeal, as he has positive performance evaluations from his direct supervisors supporting his work. 

To Kloetzel and many others who received similar notices, the explanation feels less like an honest assessment of their work and more like a pretext for a broader political agenda — one that prioritizes ideology over expertise. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget and co-author of the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda in private speeches before the election. “We want to put them in trauma.”

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Nor is DOGE’s ostensible goal of government savings likely to be met. Wickenheiser’s job, for example, was funded through a Recreation Conservation Office grant from the state of Washington, with matching funds from the federal government. “They actually aren’t saving money on some of these cut programs,” he says. 

On Feb. 22, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) highlighted the story of another forest service ranger whose salary was completely funded by Washington state. “Elon fired him,” she wrote on X. 

Many public access points, like the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument·and Saguaro National Park, have announced reduced hours or had to close visitor centers, while even popular parks like Yosemite have shut down their reservation system amid the turmoil.

While his own life has been thrown into chaos, Wickenheiser says that’s not the point. “I don’t want to be focused on as a person,” he says. “I want the land and what’s happening at the administrative level to be the focus. We cannot allow this to happen.”

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